


Flat Out of Luck

by orphan_account



Category: Gravity Falls, ParaNorman (2012)
Genre: Mild Gore, Multi, Sibling Incest, Threesome - F/M/M, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-19
Updated: 2013-01-19
Packaged: 2017-11-26 02:05:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/645348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Someone is always trying to kill them, and they never really get used to it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Flat Out of Luck

**Author's Note:**

> Some disturbing things ahead. Hope you enjoy!

There is a house in the outskirts of a gloomy, damp town called Gravity Falls. It was once called the Mystery Shack, but now it is nameless. It is only a house, a home, the residing place of a girl with a radiant smile, a boy with a determined mind, and a boy with uncanny sight.

 

+

 

They bury all the bodies in the backyard, under the lush green vegetation.

The three of them stare at a corpse, of a boy who claimed to have foresight. It’s fresh. The blood is still gushing out of the neck. The insects have yet to chew on the skin. The girl kicks the body into a hole, newly dug up. She takes her shovel and starts to fill the hole with dirt, does so with hardness on her face and her movements. Her arms are weakened, wounded, fatigued. She doesn’t cry, but her brother does, as he and the other boy help filling the grave. 

They remember how this started, and they try to justify it as much as they can. 

The only thing that keeps the darkness away is an old antique lamp, the one they’ve had for years.

 

+

 

Mabel likes to think that they are living in a sort of dream. They have a house all to themselves; they have a town that never runs out of surprises. 

She always tries to make the most out of every single day. She wears her earrings shaped like stars; she wears pink socks under her blue converses; she wears only bright colored sweaters. 

On a particular Saturday morning when the weather is fair, she rides her wobbly old bike to the convenience store to buy bags of candy just for herself. She goes to the bookshop to buy her twin brother a copy of the Odyssey. She goes to the surplus shop to buy her best friend a new pair of socks. 

She waits tables at Greasy’s Diner on the weekdays. She likes greeting customers with her giant, obnoxious smile and in her best cowgirl voice, she says “howdy ma’am” and “howdy sir.” She likes to turn on the jukebox to play songs from the 1950s. She dances to them, swaying and spinning. What she does is better than her brother’s business, she thinks. It is much better than selling photos of creatures that may or may not exist on the Internet. 

She gets free food, after all, and she makes the most out of that privilege. Lazy Susan doesn’t mind. She encourages it. She lets Mabel cook pancakes; she lets Mabel eat what she cooks. Mabel, of course, makes up for it by reeling the customers in.

She feels no shame in anything she does. She feels no need to restrain herself. 

She kisses her brother every night. She tells him how soft his lips are and how it feels like their lips are exact copies of each other. She tells him that she loves him, wholly and unconditionally. She likes to reminisce. She talks about their old house in California, their great uncle who disappeared, all the adventures they’ve had, and all the secrets they share.

Her best friend is not left out. She lets him lie down on her lap; she sings ballads and dated pop songs to him. She tells him that someday they will get married and they will go somewhere else, somewhere with even more things to look forward to. She presses her mouth onto his, sloppy and wet. She lets him take her on their bed. She watches while he kisses her brother. They touch each other; they grunt; they moan. 

After everything that she has seen, after everything that she has done, she does not see what is so shameful about what they share.

 

+

 

Dipper is determined to find out everything about the town they live in. He wants to understand why the gnomes, the phantoms, and the monsters choose to dwell here of all places. He wants to know why Old Man McGucket never seems to cripple and die. He wants to know why Grunkle Stan decided to disappear just like that, almost as a lark. 

He takes a boat ride on his own, one day. The lake is close to empty. The tourists appear less and less every year. According to his book, there is a mermaid here who likes to cause mischief. He’s never seen her. He’s tried time and again to spot her.

There are many false alarms. Every time he hears a loud splash on the water, he turns, checks to see whether there is long tail flapping about or not. When he starts to feel hopeless, he reads passages from his copy of the Odyssey.

…but the Sirens  
enchant him with the sweetness of their singing,  
sitting in their meadow, with all around them  
a great heap of bones from men rotting away  
whose skins wither upon them…

Dipper shivers.

He takes the oar. He wants to go back. The waiting has gotten him tired. 

Going back to their house involves a lot of walking, but he doesn’t complain. There is much to marvel at. He’s never gotten tired of seeing the Corduroys, sans Wendy, chopping wood, or hearing Lazy Susan’s loud voice from the diner, or feeling like the woods leading to the house is closing in on him, almost like it’s giving him a hug.

He avoids the blue house – the one that belonged to Gideon.

He cried for two nights after what they did. Usually, he cries for a week, but apparently, he is getting more accustomed to numbness.

What he feels is disgust; disgust for himself. 

The first time he slit someone’s throat was when he was fifteen. He remembers the girl with blonde hair, Pacifica Northwest. He remembers the conspiracy, the fall of a powerful family. He remembers the cries of a mob and the sirens of police cars. 

He remembers screaming. He doesn’t know from whom it came from.

They tried to tell her they had nothing to do with it, but she wouldn’t listen. It unfolded with a threat, a confrontation, and a knife against Mabel’s neck. He stopped his sister from getting killed; he killed Pacifica as consequence.

They buried her behind the house, and no one has ever suspected.

Gravity Falls, it seems, keeps its secrets confined. 

Time and again, he has thought of the rage he felt when he ended Pacifica’s life. He is scared of himself. He cannot make the fear go away. He has seen monsters, aliens, and ghosts, but they are nothing compared to his fear of himself. Mabel tries to make it go away, with words and kisses. And it works, at times, but oftentimes she needs help from a certain boy, the boy Dipper loves, the boy he met at his darkest, and the one who knows always what to say.

“We’ve killed people, and that’s unforgivable,” he says, lightly, with Dipper’s head in his chest. The boy runs his fingers gently through Dipper’s hair, stops at his temple. “But we aren’t monsters. You aren’t a monster. I know what monsters look like, and you are not a monster.”

Dipper comes home to see his sister sitting on the floor, busily eating popcorn while the boy he loves is spread out on the couch, dozed off. There are zombies attacking screaming pedestrians on the television. 

Mabel turns to him, a smile forming on her plump cheeks.

“Welcome home.”

 

+

 

What Norman likes about the town is the silence. He likes that he doesn’t have to see here.

He is glad that Dipper has learned to cast away the ghosts in Gravity Falls. Only a few words are needed, words that Dipper speaks to no one at all. Norman wants to look at the journal and find out, but he thinks that perhaps it would spoil everything. 

Norman came here when he was sixteen in his father’s car. He had nothing but a suitcase and wallet with a few hundred dollars, part of which he saved up and part of which stole from his mother’s purse. He’d gone from state to state, travelled to the other side of the country without a concrete plan in mind. He stopped in Gravity Falls on a whim. He’d heard about the famous tourist trap called the Mystery Shack, and he decided to take a look.

Running away from home remains to be the most difficult decision he’s ever made, but meeting Mabel and Dipper convinced him that he should have no regrets.

Norman is the one that stays at home, doing the laundry, washing dishes, cleaning every nook and cranny. He knows squat about cooking, however. All he does is pour cold Campbell’s soup into their chipped china bowls.

He vacuums the living room with the television on. He watches Murder on the Orient Express on the TCM channel. He wears a bandana and apron; his broom and a dustpan are in tow.

The bathrooms are cleaned next, and then the bedrooms. He always saves the kitchen for last. He checks for pests, organizes the pantry, washes the dishes, and washes the silverware. One of the knives hasn’t been cleaned for days, and he does not like to think about it. 

When he is done with everything he decides to go out to sit on the porch.

He hears the leaves rustling from tall pine trees. He hears birds, humming, singing. He feels like he has lived out all of his years. He feels at peace.

He closes his eyes and takes his surroundings in. He breathes in. The air smells like rain, imminent. It reminds him of Blithe Hollow in the spring. It reminds him of that ghost he saw near his old house, appearing only on rainy days. The ghost only stood still, staring upwards. He looked happy, like the rain was a close friend.

There is beauty to the things he sees. He knows that; he really does. But everything still drives him crazy. People expected him to know everything, and that is what made him exhausted. That is what made him want to run off. It’s stupid.

Norman dozes off, sitting with his head against a wooden column. His sleep is dreamless, pitch black.

 

+

 

There are times that Mabel feels like crying, but she does not admit it. She has to be the strong one. She is the only one who can manage it.

 

+

 

Someone is always trying to kill them. They never really get used to it.

It was just Pacifica, at first, but then the whole Northwest family started to go after them. Dipper and Mabel outsmarted them all. They hadn’t killed all of them, but they had to kill a few, with tricks and with lethal weapons.

When Norman came to stay for good, he managed to get on the nerves of a reckless time agent. Mabel slammed the guy’s head into a brick wall, and that is what did it.

It became a cycle: A psychotic teenage boy finds out about Dipper’s book, resorts to a crowbar and a break-in to get it. A woman with a crooked nose and hair like a cloud claims to be a witch, wants to rip Norman’s eyeballs out, wants to take his powers for her own. Gideon and his family kidnap Mabel, hide her in a basement for two days.

Norman tried his best to kill without a knife. He uses a beverage to save Dipper: some tea mixed with rat poison, to be exact. He was lucky the guy was thirsty. 

Mabel was the one that saved Norman, when the witch came to visit. She used a baseball bat and songs from Queen to drown out anyone’s screaming.

Dipper slit Gideon’s throat without thinking. He was just supposed to hold him down, with a spell he learned. He just wanted to get Mabel back. But after he saw Mabel’s arm full of cuts, he couldn’t settle for a minor punishment.

Norman always held the lamp; he was always first to talk sense. Dipper was always the first to cry. Mabel was always the first to start digging. 

 

+

 

Not once has Dipper told Mabel or Norman that he loved them. He couldn’t utter the words – too awkward, too risky. He feels like he doesn’t deserve them.

 

+

 

There is a song they always like to play on their years old stereo. They never figure out what the title of the song is, but they know how it goes. Mabel dances in freestyle, sings with jest. Dipper sings and sways, with his voice loud and out of tune, his head tilted back, and his eyes closed. Norman alternates Mabel and Dipper in a light embrace as he prances around, dances like a prince in a ballroom. 

 

+

 

Norman doesn’t tell them that sometimes he can still hear the ghosts. He can hear the mumbling and the screaming of every person they’ve killed. He can hear their great uncle’s voice, faintly. He never speaks of it.

 

+

 

“What if we leave?” Dipper asks, one day. He is lying on a cot on the roof. Norman and Mabel are sitting on foldable chairs. They’ve been drinking cola and eating potato chips while they stare at the full moon.

Norman looks at Dipper with surprise. Mabel keeps her head up to the sky.

“What do you mean?” Norman says.

“You know—“ Dipper turns his head to Norman. “Leave. Get away from this place. Start a new life somewhere.”

“That’d be unpractical, brother,” Mabel says, eyes still up. “And that’s coming from me.”

Norman thinks about it. He bows his head. Mabel and Dipper fall quiet for a while. Norman glances at both of them. He is between them and he feels the sibling tension, thick and cold like a glacier.

“We’re not safe here,” Dipper says.

“And what makes you think we’ll be safe out there?” Mabel retorts, with a chuckle.

The twins avoid eye contact.

“Guys,” Norman says. “I thought we were supposed to be relaxing up here.”

“We are,” they say, in unison.

Mabel grunts. “Look,” she says. “I’d love to leave someday, Dipper. I’ve dreamt about leaving so many times. It’s, like, one of my top fantasies, yeah? Right up there with owning a human-sized hamster bubble. But—“

“But what?”

“But we can’t. We don’t have the money. And this place, it keeps everything safe. It hides us. It hides everything we’ve done. This place deserves some gratitude, Dipper.”

Dipper frowns. “I’m getting sick, sis. Sick of everything. Sick of all the death.”

“You’re not the only one, bro.”

Dipper sits up, stands up. He glares at Norman and Mabel. Mabel looks away. Norman lowers his head again. “I’m sick of both of you,” Dipper says before he leaves the roof.

Mabel soon follows.

Norman is left up there. He finishes his cola. He hears an owl and some crickets. He thinks about what Dipper suggested, and he thinks about what Mabel said. Leaving, Norman thinks, cannot be done. Mabel is right. He is afraid of what may come to them here but he is also comfortable with what they have. 

Sleep overcomes him, after a while. 

When he wakes up, it is still night.

He yawns, stretches his arms. He gets on his feet to gather trash before he climbs down. 

Down in what used to be the gift shop, Norman starts hearing whispers. 

And he listens this time.

“Leave, kid. Leave for your own good.” 

“Oh, but I don’t want to lose the chance to eat your eyeballs.”

“Lil’ ol’ me will be so upset if you leave.”

“God. Don’t listen to them, kid. They’re crazy.”

“Crazier than you, Stan? Don’t think so.”

“You’re, like, the king of crazy, old man. Well, next to that Mabel bitch.”

Norman shakes his head.

“Fucking hell,” he says.

Ghosts cannot hurt him. No matter how many threats they give, he cannot be touched. He closes his eyes, works to block any sound, wills himself to think that staying here is a good decision.

“Norm!” someone yells, and Norman jolts out of deep thought.

It’s Mabel voice, and it’s coming from the living room.

He finds Mabel and Dipper on the sofa. They are sitting and they have their arms around each other. Dipper’s head is nestled on Mabel’s shoulder.

“There you are,” Mabel says. “Dipper’s been crying like an itty bitty lamby again.”

Smiling shouldn’t be appropriate at a time like this, but Norman couldn’t help it. He goes to sit beside them on the couch, and he says “c’mere,” with his arms wide open. Mabel lets go of Dipper, who quickly buries his head and his fingers into Norman’s chest. Norman puts his arms around him, with Mabel caressing his back.

“I didn’t mean it,” Dipper sobs. “When I said I was sick of you, I didn’t mean it. That can never be true. I don’t think I can stand being away from you ever.”

“I didn’t think you meant it, and I’m sure Mabel didn’t either.”

“Both of you forgive me too easily.”

“Yeah, well.” Norman cups Dipper’s cheeks. He holds Dipper’s head up, looks at his scrunched mouth and runny nose. Dipper keeps his eyes closed. Norman plants a kiss, softly first, just at the edge of Dipper’s mouth. He hears Dipper let out another sob and Mabel say: “oh, yeah, okay, totally.” Norman smiles at that. It gives him the motivation to continue with what he’s doing.

Dipper’s arms go around Norman’s neck. They kiss, and Norman feels his neck heating up. Dipper lets out whimpers instead of sobs. Mabel is silent. Norman can feel her watching.

They pause and Dipper lets go of Norman so he can kiss his sister, whose sweater he grabs tight with his fingers. Norman goes on to kiss the back of Dipper’s neck. He can hear Mabel’s giggles and Dipper’s short breaths. She tells him to take it easy, and she tells him she still can’t pull the sleeves of her sweater down. Dipper tells her that he doesn’t need anything more than this. Norman embraces Dipper, grabs on to the other boy’s stomach. He digs his nose into Dipper’s shoulder and he stays like that, smells Dipper’s sweat mixed with the faint scent of laundry detergent. Mabel smooths Dipper’s hair back and she leans in to kiss his temple. She tells him that this is the first time she’s feeling shame for anything. “But it’s not because you’re my brother,” she says. Norman looks at her earnestly. She does not continue what she says and instead she kisses them, one by one, briefly, with a smile on her face. 

 

+

 

They buy a new carpet, and they make it black this time. 

Their old one, the one with a thousand drops of blood, is burned along with a stained blouse and skirt that belongs to none of them. Norman does the burning by himself, while Mabel and Dipper stay in the house, watching an episode of Duck-Tective. He touched the garments before putting them in the fire; it makes his stomach lurch. He remembers pulling the body of Gideon’s mother into the house. Her mouth and her eyes were still wide open, and the fear she felt was still clear-cut. Norman was panicking. Mabel was telling him to keep quiet. She was limping that time; Norman saw the bruises on her legs. 

Dipper and Gideon were in the woods that time. Dipper was in a rage. Norman knew exactly how it would turn out.

Norman burns everything, all the evidence within their reach. But not because he is hiding it from any authority. He does it for Mabel and Dipper.

Till everything turns into ash, till the odors have faded away, Norman stands, watches, waits.

 

+

 

Mabel never tells them exactly what happened to her. She cannot tell them that Gideon’s father slashed her arm with broken glass. She cannot tell them how Gideon kicked her, made her cough up blood. She was bribed by Gideon’s mother with tables full of dessert, but she kept her mouth closed. Her only sources of comfort were her memories of how she, Norman, and Dipper survived every single time one of them was bound and gagged, hit in the head, made to bleed.

“Please, girl, just accept my son. It will make things much easier for all of us,” the woman told Mabel.

“I’d much rather die here of hunger, if you don’t mind me saying so.” 

Gideon came a few moments later, and he asked whether or not Mabel was ready to accept him. He was right in front of her, not tall or domineering at all.

She spat on his face.

“Not a fucking chance.”

 

+

 

“Hello?” 

Dipper hears her voice and it makes his throat close up. He only manages a faint mumble before he puts down the phone.

He misses his mother, very much so. He misses his father too. He misses them both, but he made it clear to them that he and Mabel wouldn’t go back to California, and that they’d be staying here. 

There is no facing them anymore. He does not want his parents to be associated with him in any way. He has too much to be ashamed of.

When he tells Mabel he tried to call them, her smile switches from radiant to concerned. “I told you not to do that Dippy.” Dipper replies with an “I know” and an “I miss them.” She tells him that she misses them too, but there’s nothing they can do.

 

+

 

Somewhere along the road, when they’re all in their twenty-something’s, they do decide to leave the town. They pack their clothes, some food, their old antique lamp, and their most important belongings. They leave on a Monday morning. All of this was totally planned, and Dipper was the one who set it in motion: He bought the vehicle – an old pickup truck that they bought from the newly opened dealership just across the grocer’s. The three of them fit in the front seat. Dipper drives, as he is the only one who has a license. Mabel sits in the middle, and Norman sits by the window. 

Dipper keeps his eye on the road. Mabel is smiling, big and bright. Norman looks out the window, sees the spirit of a man hanging from a tree. They are heading south. At least they think they are. They do not know exactly where they’re going, but at this point, they couldn’t care less.

Mabel rubs the ring on her finger. She looks at Norman, takes his hand. “Hey, don’t look so gloomy, Normy,” she says. Norman gives her a squeeze and half a smile. He tells her to “make Dipper stop looking so serious.” Dipper puffs up his cheeks and says “shut it.” Mabel laughs, calls them “her boys,” calls them “stupid dorks.”

“You know, we could just turn around and head up north to Washington,” Mabel says. “Only state in the West Coast where a certain something is legal.” She wags her eyebrows and wriggles her ring finger at Dipper’s face.

At that, Dipper sputters, and he almost misses a stoplight. Norman and Mabel both laugh. Norman says some cheesy line about how he’d “take both of them if he could,” and it makes Dipper flush like a tomato. 

And one way or another, they work out an arrangement, because they’re good that. On a cold November morning, Mabel finds herself wearing a short white sundress along with her star-shaped earrings in a chapel in Las Vegas. Norman wears a suit he rented from a thrift shop. Dipper stands as witness. Months later, they are in Massachusetts, in a town some miles away from Norman’s old home. Dipper and Norman are wearing shirts and jeans, while they tell each other ill-prepared wedding vows. Mabel cheers for them inappropriately. They know all the documents they sign will probably be invalidated, but the thing is, they don’t care.

They’ve left Gravity Falls and all the bodies in the backyard. They no longer have a big old house to call their own. They don’t have stable jobs or mysterious books to help them cope with the unexplainable. 

Every now and then, someone still tries jamming a knife into their chests. It’s the only fixture they’ve got, and it’s something they know exactly how to deal with. 

 

**-fin-**

**Author's Note:**

> That verse on the sirens was grabbed from Jenny March's Classical Mythology. Didn't make it up!


End file.
